Ellie countdown

The NY Times has a feature today about The New Yorker’s editor David Remnick. He and David Carey deserve all the credit they receive for “saving” the best magazine published.

Quote:

The New Yorker’s readers apparently like what they see and are renewing at a rate, 76.5 percent, that is usually reserved for life-sustaining prescriptions. Even as the subscription price has risen, paid circulation has climbed 9 percent in Mr. Remnick’s four years as editor to 878,903, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations for the six months ended Dec. 31, 2001. Ad pages have been tougher to come by (through May 6, they are down 11.2 percent this year compared to the same period last year) but even so, The New Yorker is outperforming the industry.

Losses at the magazine, a fact of life since Advance Publications bought it in 1985, are between $6 million and $8 million, according to officials at Condé Nast. While not an insignificant amount, the figure is a far cry from the $30 million the magazine lost in 1993, Ms. Brown’s first full year. Mr. Remnick and David Carey, the publisher of The New Yorker, say they believe that a recovery in the broader ad market will bring profitability.

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One thought on “Ellie countdown”

As a long-time New Yorker fan, you’re right. David Remnick is sending the mag in the right direction. He’s giving us — I think someone in the NYT piece said — something along the lines of “the thinking person’s newsmagazine” sandwiched in between those incredible articles that make the New Yorker what it is. The recent piece on the Kurds was riveting, horrifying and something you wouldn’t read anywhere else. It’s much more relevant that Tina Brown’s New Yorker — and I find myself reading more of it, as well. At the same time, I do find the magazine still doing important, creative work. I believe they are right, the ads will come when the rest of the industry picks back up. Sign me up for another year…

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Launched in August, 2000, RexBlog.com is the personal blog of Rex Hammock, founder/ceo of Hammock Inc., a customer media and marketing services company founded in 1991 in Nashville. Rex is also founder/helper-in-chief of SmallBusiness.com.(...)